The true cost of the phone hacking scandal surging through Rupert Murdoch's British media empire has not yet emerged, with new developments still emerging every hour, and the Australian-born tycoon's reputation in question from New York to Sydney.

Rupert Murdoch, fighting to bring under control a crisis that has cost him a $12 billion deal, is unlikely to rush into the sale of the newspaper business at the heart of the hacking uproar in Britain.

A massive new effort to crack down on intellectual property theft spans industries and every point of the content creation and distribution chain. It's called "Copyright Alert System" and it aims to stop people pirating from pirating content online, by very simply preventing them from surfing the web.